DANCE LIKE NO ONE IS WATCHINGHappiness is a journey, not a destination.

Thought for the day :

Work like you don't need money,
Love like you've never been hurt,
And dance like no one's watching.

Live Passionately!

"One day at a time - this is enough. Do not look back and grieve over the past, for it is gone: and do not be troubled about the future, for it has not yet come. Live in the present, and make it so beautiful that it will be worth remembering."
Ida Scott Taylor
1820-1915, Author

"Home! And this is my room - and you are all here! And I'm not going to leave here ever again, because I love you all!

And --- Oh, Auntie Em -----

there's no place like home!"

Home is where the heart is. People long to be at home; Your home is whatever place you long to be. I've had a lovely time traveling, but home is where the heart is...I hope everyone is well and joyful. I missed you all :) Wasn't that article on Madeira...cool? What an awesome place. I will post some more pictures from there soon.

It feels good to be home!

I love getting away and it doesn't even have to be far. I gain such a fresh perspective and lets face it...these days when we are left to face reality of our economic state, it can hit a nerve very quickly. So remember, you may not have to go very far from home to get some vacation time. You can do something in your local town or just relax at home.

Whatever you choose to do just shut down the computer and close the office for a few days. NO business phone calls, NO business meetings, NO paperwork etc… Outsource your work to this Virtual Assistant.JUST CLOSE UP SHOP, GET UP AND GET AWAY!!!!!

If you are fortunate enough to get up and get away, it can prove to be beneficial for you, your family and your business.

See ya tmw.

"Every decision you make - every decision - is not a decision about what to do. It's a decision about Who You Are. When you see this, when you understand it, everything changes. You begin to see life in a new way. All events, occurrences, and situations turn into opportunities to do what you came here to do."Neale Donald Walsch

Madeira may not be a complete secret, but it’s somewhere you’ll probably want to keep quiet about once you’ve discovered it

We live in a World in which there isn’t enough time to do everything, so we need to do things differently. We need time to experience, time to feel sensations, emotions and MOMENTS.

Seemingly set adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, Madeira is the complete holiday escape for those in search of something a little bit special, away from the crowds. This Portuguese island is quite simply a haven for renewing your energy, refreshing your body and discovering something completely new.

FIVE SENSESBeauty- Health – Wellbeing – Food – Travel

Bold and uncompromising just like the changing world it so perfectly encapsulated. One should never underestimate the profound resiliency of the human spirit, nor how swiftly things can change for the better - often overnight.“To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves” – Mahatma Gandhi

Having a brilliant time...missing you all :) Hope everyone is well and joyfulCheers!Christine :)

Set in the Atlantic Ocean c.350 mi (560 km) off the coast of Morocco, Madeira, the largest island, and Porto Santo are inhabited; the Desertas and Selvagens (the latter being somewhat closer to Africa) are not. Known to the Romans as the Purple Islands, they were rediscovered (15th cent.) under HENRY THE NAVIGATOR.

The volcanic origins of Madeira can still be seen,; the amphitheatre that surrounds Funchal was once a caldera. The Island is surprisingly mountainous with peaks of 1,860 metres; over 6,100 feet high! Fortunately for the tourists, volcanic activity stopped about 6,500 years ago. This activity has endowed the island with a fertile landscape where much of the island was, until comparatively recently covered in ancient subtropical rainforest. Indeed this is the reason for the name of the island, 'Madeira' meaning 'wood' in Portuguese.

Parts of this forest (Laurisilva) still remain, mainly on the northern slopes and have become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but the superb blooms for which the island has become famous may be found in abundance all year round. One of the nicest ways to see the dynamic and panoramic vistas is to take a Levada Walk along side the water channels designed to supply irrigation to the drier parts.

Madeira is a scenic, year-round resort. The islands produce bananas, sugarcane and Madeira Wine, but now derive much of their economic growth from tourism. The north remains mainly rural in nature whilst the south, especially in and around Funchal has developed with the discerning traveller in mind. Most, but by no means all, of the Island's finest hotels are found in this area.

2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” - St. Augustine

3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” - Samuel Johnson

5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” - Paul Fussell

6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac

7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” - Moorish proverb

8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” - Dagobert D. Runes

9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” - John Steinbeck

10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” - Lin Yutang

11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” - Aldous Huxley

12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” - Samuel Johnson

13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” - Robert Louis Stevenson“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” - Henry Miller

14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” - Cesare Pavese

15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” - Henry Miller

16″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” - Moslih Eddin Saadi

17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” - D. H. Lawrence

18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” - Freya Stark

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain

20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” - Miriam Beard

21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” - Martin Buber

22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” - Jawaharial Nehru

24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” - Bill Bryson

25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” - Lao Tzu

28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” - Charles Dudley Warner

29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” - Lao Tzu

30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” - James Michener

31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” - T. S. Eliot

32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” - Tim Cahill

33. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” - Mark Twain

34. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” - Pat Conroy“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” - Lao Tzu

35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” - Benjamin Disraeli

37. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” - Maya Angelou

39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” - Seneca

41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do - especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” - William Least Heat Moon

42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” - Lillian Smith

43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” - Aldous Huxley

44. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” - Freya Stark

45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” - Rudyard Kipling

46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” - Paul Theroux

47. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” - G. K. Chesterton

48. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” - Clifton Fadiman

49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” - Carlo Goldoni

50. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure - self-determined, self-motivated, often risky - forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind - and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” - Mark Jenkins

If we can’t be honest with ourself who can we be honest with? The mind can be good at justifying our wrong actions and behaviour. But, clever self-justification is of no benefit in the long run. If we can be aware of our own pride, jealousy, insecurities then we have a chance to let go of them. But, if we always justify our wrong attitudes to ourself then we are lost.

To establish true self esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.Denis Waitley

Low self esteem is like driving through life with your hand-break on.Maxwell Maltz

If you aren't good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you'll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren't even giving to yourself.Barbara De Angelis

Respect yourself if you would have others respect you.Baltasar Gracian

The strongest single factor in prosperity consciousness is self-esteem. Believing you can do it, believing you deserve it, believing you will get it.Jerry Gillies

A person's worth in this world is estimated according to the value they put on themselves.Jean De La Bruyere

Of all the judgments you make in life, none is as important as the one you make about yourself. The difference between low self-esteem and high self-esteem is the difference between passivity and action, between failure and success.Nathaniel Branden

Having a low opinion of yourself is not "modesty". It's self-destruction. Holding your uniqueness in high regard is not "egotism". It's a necessary precondition to happiness and success.Bobbe Sommer

We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals.Stephen Covey